Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 34
Rich and powerful people often do not have an ideology or a consistent set of beliefs. Their ideology is pragmatism and opportunism. They will believe and say whatever they need to in the moment in order to get more wealth and power. This is vital to keep in mind when trying to understand and predict their behavior.
Acquiring and wielding enormous power and wealth is virtually impossible without constantly lying, both to others and yourself. Rich and powerful people lie so fluently and constantly that it doesn't even register in their minds, it's just the only way they know how to live. Their entire lifestyle and mental structure is oriented around it. So there actually is an important psychological difference between ordinary people and megalomaniacs. Megalomaniacs do not think like you or me. They have sold their souls to the devil for power, wealth, and status. This is a fundamental decision they made early in life and never looked back. Truth and integrity does not exist for them, even though of course they tell themselves otherwise. But it is crucial that you understand that rich and powerful people are literally incapable of doing the Actualized work because their life would implode. I want you to really understand and appreciate the cost of the Actualized work, and why it is so rarely done. You have to give up aspirations for serious power, wealth, fame, and sex in the name of truth. Very, very few people will do that because they do not comprehend the value of truth while the value of those others things is obvious.
Truth is antithetical to power. Contemplate why.
Note: Of course, do not make the silly mistake of thinking that poor and lower class people are champions of truth. No, no, no. Lower class people also have a shocking disregard for truth, but for other reasons, usually reasons of ignorance and low intelligence. Lower class people are usually more honest and authentic than the powerful, but they are still profoundly ignorant. One can be a very authentic and honest ignoramus. This is why populism is a canard. On the other hand, the powerful are more cunning, conniving, and manipulative.
So who cares about truth then?, you might ask. Basically, no one. But there are degrees of selling your soul to the devil and you should distinguish between them.
Wolfram has one of the best understandings of how reality works, for a scientist. But I must stress, for a scientist.
This is about as profound as science gets:
As great as Wolfram is, I still hesitate sharing this with you because Wolfram's model is not at all the correct explanation of reality, and I don't want you to get mislead by the entire paradigm science. It is good — for science — but it is nowhere good enough from the point of view of our work. There is only so much understanding that the paradigm of science allows, so relative to that, Wolfram's work is profound. Enjoy his explanations, glean whatever insights you can, but do not start to take it as literally true. You will awaken far beyond such scientific reductions. God is way beyond all that. Consciousness is not reducible to computation. Reality is not finite/discrete. You can subdivide space (consciousness) forever.
With all those caveats in mind you can still appreciate Wolfram's work. And you will go beyond it.
The recent Life Purpose Course video outage is now fixed.
Sorry for the delay.
Have you ever wondered what happens to all your waste?
It's more fascinating than it sounds.
This man threw away his hard drive into a landfill with 8,000 bitcoins on it. Now worth $800 million.
A beautiful depiction of Infinity:
That's what God/Consciousness/Mind is like in its purest form.
Try to imagine that each white dot is its own Infinity, which you could zoom into forever. This gives you a sense of an infinity of Infinities. An infinity of Gods. Each white dot is a God unto itself, absolutely sovereign, holographically containing all the other dots. Indra's Net.
Note: Don't take this too literally. Infinity can look many different ways.
Credit: Lemat Works
I really liked this guy's take on solitude:
What I find most interesting about this is how when you're young, socializing feels exciting and new, but as you gain more experience and mature you realize that most of socialization is just noise. It's shallow, it gets weary and repetitive, and it just isn't meaningful or satisfying compared to the depth of contemplation. I have felt this way since high school. I can socialize, but the rewards of it feel shallow, like I'm collecting pennies out of a public fountain when I could be swimming in my own gold vault like Scrooge McDuck. It took me a long time to realize what makes socialization work. The shallower the mind the more value socialization has. The deeper the mind, the less meaning socialization has because your own mind is more rewarding and profound than anything a human could say to you. What are you really going to talk about with a human? You're going to talk about something profound like God or Love? Why? When you could connect to God or Love so much more deeply sitting alone in a closet. But to someone who has not made that decade's long investment in building up their philosophical mind, that kind of connection to reality just doesn't exist. So for them going out with a gaggle of friends to a nightclub is meaningful. I can go to a nightclub, I can make it fun, but it is not meaningful to me so I cannot sustain the activity. After a certain point it feels like a waste of my life.
Eventually you exhaust socialization. You exhaust clubbing, partying, small talk around the dinner table about the news, internet debates, arguing with others, trying to convince or persuade others that they are wrong and you are right. You exhaust asking people how their day is going, or what's new. In the end, what does it matter what's new, how someone's day is going? It's just some minor variation of the same petty human drama, over and over again. In the end, you realize that all of it is meaningless. These things only have meaning if you are lost in the dream of them. Once you exhaust that dream or finding something existentially deeper, that way of life becomes inferior because it's just too existentially shallow. But most people live that way because they don't even know anything deeper exists, and also because their survival demands it. You can't have solitude if you manage a company or work in a team on some big project. I can do deep solitude because I developed financial independence, which few people have. Even wealthy people don't really have it, since they have to keep running their businesses like rats in a wheel. So even the ability to have solitude is a precious thing most humans couldn't do until retirement.
Warning: This is just one perspective on socialization. Keep in mind that I'm very introverted, so that is my bias. If you're extroverted this perspective and lifestyle will not work for you. And even if you're introverted, you need to learn to socialize before you make a retreat into solitude. Especially if you are young and lack social skills, do not use this perspective to bypass developing those skills. I am not telling you that all socializing is bad. Socializing is a critical skill and plays a critical role in human life, even for me. So be careful not to misapply this blog post. Remember that the perspective in the above video came late in his life, after he exhausted socialization. Notice that he did not do a bypass. It would be inappropriate to adopt his perspective in your 20s. With maturity, age, and burning through your karma, you can grow into solitude as he did. I also recommend that you have phases in your life where you are highly social and phases where you go into deep solitude. These alternating phases are very beneficial to your development.